“If Catcher in the Rye has lost its raw clout for recent generations of Internet-suckled American youth, here is a coming-of-age novel to replace it.”   — Publishers Weekly (starred review) The first days of summer: Jim Praley is home from college, ready to unlock Tulsa's secrets. He drives the highways. He forces himself to get out of his car and walk into a bar. He's invited to a party. And there he meets Adrienne Booker; Adrienne rules Tulsa, in her way. A high-school dropout with a penthouse apartment, she takes a curious interest in Jim. Through her eyes, he will rediscover his hometown: its wasted sprawl, the beauty of its late nights, and, at the city's center, the unsleeping light of its skyscrapers. In the tradition of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , A Map of Tulsa is elegiac, graceful, and as much a story about young love as it is a love letter to a classic American city. Returning home from college to Tulsa for the summer, teenage Jim encounters wealthy, bohemian Adrienne, a distant acquaintance from high school, and falls in love. At the end of the summer, however, he returns to college and—perhaps improbably—loses touch with her. Five years later he receives an e-mail out of the blue that impulsively sends him back to Tulsa. Lytal’s first novel is dense with the maplike details of a specific place, the city of Tulsa, and also of the intricate geography of two young hearts. Taking himself very seriously, as young adults do, Jim is essentially humorless, as is Adrienne. And though the young man examines his relationship with Adrienne almost microscopically, the pair’s actions often seem arbitrary. Tulsa itself is a character in the novel but one that seems empty, the streets deserted and the city itself like a ghost town. A similar hollowness sometimes seems to infect the book itself. All this aside, however, it is beautifully written. Jim is an aspiring poet, and Lytal brings the same sensibility to his novel, making it, in the final analysis, a memorable reading experience. --Michael Cart “Fearless, serious, and impressive. . . . Masterly. . . . Captivating. . . . Lytal asks the essential questions: how to be good; how to be an adult; how to live outside one’s head; how to love unselfishly; how to understand if this girl, this town—any of it, anything at all—are indispensable, and if they’re meaningful enough to turn into art. . . .  Girl, town, youth and book are literary devices, as Jim—and Lytal—make clear. But the experience of love and place is not. In the tension between these truths, A Map of Tulsa finds its central insights and strengths. The girl may never have been ours to have. The town may be just a random place we’re from. Youth may be no more than a dream of possibility. But the book: the book is real. And the book, after all, is what we came for.” —Gary Sernovitz, The New York Times Book Review “Mr. Lytal, a Tulsa native, gets the push and pull of home just right.” — The New York Times “This lyrical slow burn of a book is . . . a meditation on place, destiny, and fate.” — The New Yorker “Tender and engaging. . . . . A memorable coming-of-age tale about hometown ambivalence and finding a place in the world. . . . The tension between the cosmopolitan and provincial, the sensuous and the chaste, is a big reason why A Map of Tulsa is so memorable. . . . [Lytal’s] great achievement in A Map of Tulsa is to bring his hometown to life as a place where all sorts of American ghosts can be found living amid the seemingly generic landscape of a midsized, middle-American city.” —Héctor Tobar, The Los Angeles Times “Jim and Adrienne’s relationship begins with some mild drug use and frottage before lurching into a creepily detailed ménage a trois, at which point the novel begins to shake and rumble like a small, unexpectedly powerful volcano. . . . A Map of Tulsa deserves comparison with the very best novels of its kind, from James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime to Scott Spencer’s Endless Love . It’s also one of the most insightful books about the comforts (and traps) of small-city parochialism I’ve ever read.” —Tom Bissell, Harper’s “ A Map of Tulsa is superbly evocative of Jim and Adrienne's discoveries of sex, love and jealousy. Mr. Lytal's exhilarating writing is reminiscent of winsome, confessional bildungsromans like Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) or John Cotter's Under the Small Lights (2010).” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “Fantastic. . . . A Great Gatsby of the plains.” —Julia Holmes, Men’s Journal   “Ambitious. . . . Witty. . . .  Wise. . . . A joyous elegy to the great, passed-over cities of middle America. . . . Like Bret Easton Ellis’s Clay from Less Than Zero , another kid on break from college, Jim has the freedom to remake himself. . . . And with good old Jim as our eyes and ears, we experience the ecstasy of that first, 20-something romance.” —The Boston Globe   “[An] elegan